Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of the ministerial statement on closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and the Prime Minister's report of 2013. I would like to commend the Prime Minister and the government. I think this is a very important document, and every year that goes past it is a more important document because it provides us with trend lines so that we can, with some confidence, know whether or not we are actually going to meet the targets in 2030. That obviously allows us to provide some priorities in where we put our resources in this area.

I would like to go through some of the indicators—though not in the order provided in the Closing the gap report. The first is life expectancy and the second is infant mortality. The reason that I mention those two first is that I think there has been quite a deal of success in those areas. I do not think anyone has any doubt that life expectancy—certainly in the Northern Territory jurisdiction—is going up, and there are no issues that are going turn it to trend down again. So, in effect, we are above trend line. There are no issues around that that I think are going to stop us meeting that benchmark. The second is infant mortality. That is a little bit more problematic in the return on the data. Whilst that is on track, it is not quite above trend. From the experts I speak to, I think we could all reasonably say that they are two indicators that we are not going to have to worry about, though that does not mean that we should take our eye off the ball. We are actually going to meet those targets. They are the only two that are really on track.

One of the other indicators is access to preschool. We have, as is declared in this report, met that target. It is a target that is probably one of the easiest ones, because it is not a social target. It is normally a bricks-and-mortar target. We know it is about putting resources aside for staffing, buildings and processes. Australia has a right to be very pleased that the vast majority of Indigenous people now have access to a preschool. But, of course, access is not the only thing. It is very important but, as the Prime Minister mentioned in her ministerial statement, we need to go from access to attendance.

Given that the target regarding access to preschool has in effect been met, I think it would be quite reasonable—given that this is a guiding document that informs Australians and will both inform and guide future parliaments about where we place our resources—in future documents to deal with the issues around attendance in these preschools. Instead of just ticking off, 'Yes, we have got a line item and we have built them and we are happy now,' we should think about having an additional one to deal with how those preschools are going. I will leave it to the experts to find benchmarks that would give us an indication of the success or otherwise around attendance.

The next indicator is the 16- to 24-year-olds with year 12 or equivalent. This is a sad reality, and it really irks me, because without attaining year 12 or equivalent, it really makes it hard to take up what we normally say are opportunities—for example, the opportunity to see the world and travel. For that you need to have funds and to have funds you need to get a good job and you need to be very competitive. We have had a two per cent increase in five years. We are not on track. We are not going to make it. We really need to put a lot of thought—not more resources but a lot of thought—into that. It is not only about a two per cent increase in five years. Just over 50 per cent of the Aboriginal population actually gets a year 12 leaving certificate—against 86 per cent for everyone else. It is hard to see the other side. Eighty-six per cent of mainstream people expect to receive the Higher School Certificate and go on to have a whole range of choices. They expect to get automatic entry to vocational education, entry matriculation and a choice of professional life. But only 50 per cent of Aboriginal people are going to get that.

The last of the indicators is the employment indicator. There have been minor improvements, but I think everybody would acknowledge that this is not even close to being on track. We are not going to make the target. There is no question about that, and there has to be significant change. These things interact. If we do not get an increase in the number of Aboriginal people completing year 12, we are certainly not going to get an increase in the employment area. These things are all interlinked, and it is very important that we work on those two areas.

We have come out with a book, and I commend the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. We all talk glowingly about this and we all need to feel good about ourselves. To be frank, there are two indicators that are generally going to look after themselves. One is a building program; we finished that. That leaves only two indicators, but we are not going anywhere on them. We are not going to hit the target. We are not going to close the gap. I think that a lot of intellectual horsepower is going to have to go into it. It is not just about more money; we need to start thinking of innovative ways in which we can make changes in these very, very important areas.

Of course, there are some complementary reports that can give us an idea about how well our first Australians are progressing in these areas. Certainly from the perspective of Northern Australia, the NAPLAN results are downright depressing. There are many areas that just say, 'We have done school and we can't read and write.' I am even more saddened by the fact that a child can manage to get to the end of primary school before someone says, 'No, you can't read and write.' There is a systemic failure through the education system in some areas, and that has to be rectified as soon as possible.

It is very good to have this data, and it becomes more valuable and more practical over time. It does help us manage what we do. But I have a concern that the headline figures may well obscure something that is happening on the ground. For example, in year 12 acceleration. Yes, we crept forward two per cent; I suspect it is probably more than that in metropolitan areas, and I suspect it is going back rapidly in very remote areas. I think, in terms of a suggested improvement in how we may look at these matters, we need to disaggregate the data so that we are better able to target our resources where they need to be deployed and where the effort really needs to be targeted.

If you look closely at this data and you take away those things that we are going to achieve, those last two indicators where we are simply not closing the gap, where we are not going to get there, are just fundamental to closing the gap on opportunity, and it is a real shame that that is not the case. I certainly look forward to seeing the 2014 data and I hope it is a substantive improvement.

I have to say that I was a little disappointed in the Prime Minister's attempt—in the middle of all of this, and it is all quite a respectable process—to take a cheap shot at Queensland and the Northern Territory about alcohol. We have those debates; they are robust debates, and they should be. But I saw it as a pretty cheap shot in order to impress people in some of the more populated areas around our south-east, in a political sense, rather than trying to provide this as something that has some gravitas and some independence and to try to keep the politics out of it. I was a little sad that the Prime Minister was not a little bit better informed with respect to her references to the banned drinkers register and the Northern Territory. There is quite a large body of data that I have seen and validated, that indicates that issues such as one person who was on the banned drinkers register has been arrested 117 times—each one of them when they were drunk—and the fact that 60 people on the register have been arrested over 2,000 times. At the end of the day, the motivation of the register was to stop people getting access to alcohol. Clearly it did not work at all. Everybody accepts that. So there has to be a better way.

Those people who are trapped in the system—they are sick. You cannot treat them in the justice system. You have to take them from the justice system and you have to rehabilitate them in the health system. That is what is happening in the Northern Territory. I commend the Closing the gap: Prime Minister's report 2013 to the House.

Question agreed to.